


here comes the first day after the war

by defcontwo



Category: Captain America (Comics), Marvel (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/F, F/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-31
Updated: 2013-05-31
Packaged: 2017-12-13 11:57:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/824054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/defcontwo/pseuds/defcontwo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His whole life, the only thing that ever made sense was drawing. Or: the one where Team America does an Art School AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	here comes the first day after the war

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CallMeBombshell](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CallMeBombshell/gifts).



> I have absolutely no idea how this happened. Steve goes to something something mumble-y art school in New York City. Handwave dubious characterization something something. I'm pretty sure that I used to say that I would never write an AU like this and yet here we are. I blame my friend Moony and Chris Evans's face.

His whole life, the only thing that ever made sense was drawing. Drawing on sidewalks with chalk, scratching castles into the dirt with the nearest stick, and sketching miniature comics into the margins of his textbooks. It’s the only thing that’s ever really come easily to Steve. 

Through his father’s death and losing the house and moving into an one bedroom apartment in Brooklyn with his mother, art has always been the one thing that’s centered him. It gives him focus when it feels like everything else is falling down around him. 

Steve does a fair amount of hand wringing when applying to colleges because logic tells him he should study something that will guarantee him a job and every high school adviser he speaks to tells him art would be a dead end. They’d never had much money growing up and he has this itch under his skin that tells him he isn’t doing right by his mother, that he’d be letting her down.

But she sits him down and tells him that they’d make it work, just like they’ve always made it work. “You never give up on what you want, Steven,” she tells him, and she looks at him with such unflinching belief that it gives him hope. 

The day Steve finds out he got a full ride to his dream school, he figures she was right all along. 

Except. 

Except his mother dies just a few weeks shy of his high school graduation, a hit and run on her way back from a late shift at the hospital, and suddenly the thought of doing anything that’s not lying prone on the floor of their apartment’s living room makes him feel sick to his stomach. 

Art school, that far off hope that he had looked forward to for so long, no longer feels right to him. 

Two weeks after graduation, Steve joins the army. 

\+ 

The army is a lot of things. It’s his crucible, the worst and best idea he’s ever had, and the hardest thing he’s ever done. 

Steve had shot up around seventeen after spending his whole life scrawny but nothing could have prepared him for the utter hell of basic training leading into the even worse hell of combat. 

A lot of his idealism dies out there, in the desert. Some days, Steve thinks it would have swallowed him whole, if it weren’t for Bucky, one of the men in his platoon. They are fast friends in a way that Steve has rarely ever experienced, and maybe it is a friendship born of blood and sweat and fire, but it is one of his only bright spots. 

He understands, now, the haunted look in his father’s eyes whenever he spoke of Vietnam. 

And through it all, he draws. After his mother died, he had thought he’d never want to draw again but there are a lot of long, hard nights out there in the desert with fuck all to do, and his fingers itch for a notebook and pencil. 

After one tour in Iraq and two in Afghanistan, Bucky stays but Steve goes. He doesn’t feel like he’s doing much good, in the end, and his mind is clear. 

He knows what he wants to return to. 

\+ 

It is strange to be back in New York after all this time, rejoining the world again. He’s a twenty-one year old freshman who keeps getting asked if he’s wandered in lost, hardly the typical image of an art student in his ratty old army t-shirt. 

Steve spends the first few weeks bumbling from one class to the next - he is only sure of himself in the moment, with a pencil and notebook in hand, the broad strokes casting themselves across blank sheets of paper with ease. But he still feels uncomfortable in this school with all of these new people. 

Until he meets Natasha, who is all lean dancer grace with pointe shoes slung over her shoulder and she smiles at him easily, cracking a dark joke that he normally wouldn't laugh at but he can't help a snort let loose. 

He wonders what sort of colors he’d have to mix together to get the exact shades of her hair. 

“I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve heard that pick up line around here,” she says. 

Steve boggles, a little, before realizing that _he had said that out loud_. “No, I didn’t mean. I was just. I was thinking aloud,” he finishes lamely, already thinking that there’s no salvaging what had started as an otherwise promising conversation. 

Natasha arches an eyebrow. “So, you weren’t engaging in the past-time that so many of your peers delight in by trying to draw apparently hapless dancers into their web of artist’s muse bullshit?”

“Uh, no. I mean, you’re very beautiful but. It’s my first week, I was kind of just hoping to make a friend first.” 

“First week? You’re a non-traditional student?” 

“Yeah, I just got out of the army.” 

She nods, as if coming to a decision, before looping an arm through his. “Come on, then, soldier. Let me buy you a coffee.” 

He doesn’t know it yet but it’s the day he made the best friend he’ll ever have in all four years of study. 

\+ 

Natasha is in dance, and she is sharp and talented and easily the most terrifying girl that he’s met since Peggy, his high school girlfriend. They bond over many things but above all, they bond over their mothers. 

Natasha speaks so warmly of her mother, a dancer herself who came over from Moscow at eighteen with not a whole lot else aside from bloody-minded determination, that Steve finds it easy to open up about his own mother. 

They spend long hours in an empty dance studio, Steve sprawled in the corner with a notebook and Natasha practicing and practicing until even her finely honed disciplined calls for a rest. At which point she’ll collapse into the corner with Steve and demand that he carry her for her muscles will surely give out. It’s always said with a smirk, like she thinks he won’t really do it, until one day he does and they walk across campus back towards the dorms like that, attracting stares along the way. 

She takes him home with her to Chicago for every holiday, where her mother teaches him how to make Borscht and shovel the absurdly high Midwestern snow. 

And even then, it still takes them over two years to realize that they have more in common than they’d known. 

+  
“How do you know James Barnes?” 

“Hmm?” Steve looks away from where he was finishing up a painting to Natasha, who has one hand on her hip and the other hand waving a letter around. “I’ve told you about him a million times, Nat.” 

“I’m sure I would have remembered that, Steve.” 

“It’s Bucky. You know, we were in the same platoon together. I write to him all of the time.” 

“James Barnes is Bucky,” Natasha says flatly. 

“...Yes?” 

She reaches up and pinches the bridge of her nose. “Of course he is.” 

“Can we back up, how do _you_ know Bucky?” 

“We used to date back in high school.” 

Steve drops the paintbrush he was holding in surprise and then swears at the splotch of paint all over the hardwood floor. Now he’s definitely not getting his deposit back. 

It makes sense, he realizes. Bucky mentioned living in Chicago, Natasha is from Chicago, it’s not the most insane thing he’s ever heard. 

Except for the part where it really kind of is. 

“How could you not know his nickname was Bucky?” 

Natasha shrugs. “We didn’t go to the same school, he introduced himself to me as James.” 

Steve has to laugh because that is exactly the sort of thing Bucky would do, introducing himself as James to come off as mature to a girl like Natasha. “Was this a torrid love affair? Casual high school fling?” 

She smiles and it’s that soft smile that Natasha only saves for the people she really cares for. “Bit of column A, bit of column B.” 

Steve senses that that’s the most he’s going to get out of her on the subject, so he lets it go, and resumes his painting. 

Even still, he can’t resist bursting out with, “I can’t believe you know _Bucky_ ” after a good ten minutes of silence. 

Natasha throws a paintbrush at his head. 

\+ 

The years go by in a blur of bright colors and charcoal smudges all over his fingers, the red of Natasha’s hair whipping around as she pirouettes. 

Slowly, Steve finds his footing again. He thinks that he’ll probably always have nightmares about gunfire and sand but after a while, it feels normal to be going to classes and painting and to be concerned with matters that aren’t life and death. 

He dates more than he would have expected. First, there’s Sharon, an ACLU intern that he’d met at a political rally. She is passionate and engaged and a touch more cynical than he would have expected and being with her makes him feel like he could do anything. They break up, eventually, but remain friends which relieves him to no end because Natasha never would have forgiven him otherwise. 

And then here’s Tim, a photography major who in the end is a touch too closed off and they don’t stay friends after, but it was the first time that Steve let himself become comfortable with exploring his sexuality outside of the purview of the U.S. Army. For that, he thinks that he’ll always think back on the other boy fondly. 

It’s been over two months now since that break up when they decide to go out for a night on the town to unwind. 

“I’m telling you,” Natasha says, waving her glass of white wine in Steve’s direction, “that you can do better. You’re my Steve Rogers. Demand excellence, Steven.” 

Sharon snorts into her beer. “Should you be giving love advice, Nat? You talk about your arch nemesis like you don’t know whether or not you want to beat her or fuck her.” 

“Yelena,” Natasha says archly, “is _not_ my arch nemesis. We have a healthy level of competition.” 

“Yeah, a level of competition where you want to get to your knees on the floor of the dance studio and eat her out until she screams that you’re better than her,” Sharon says. 

Steve groans, putting a hand over his eyes. “God, _Sharon_.”

“Am I wrong?” 

Natasha cackles, which as good an answer as any. 

“What about that guy we met at that poetry slam at Tom’s bookstore, the social worker? What was it, Sam?” Sharon says. 

Steve clears his throat awkwardly. “Sam Wilson, that the one you mean?” 

“You looked like you wanted to climb him like a tree, Steve,” Natasha says. 

Steve plants his head face down on the table and groans again. 

“ _Like a tree_ ,” Sharon confirms.

“I hate you both.” 

\+ 

Steve is just stuffing a letter to Bucky into the postbox when his phone rings, and he fumbles to answer it. “Rogers.” 

“Hey, Steve? It’s Sam. From the poetry slam, you gave me your number.” 

Steve leans back against the postbox and smiles subconsciously. “Hey, Sam. What can I do for you?” 

“I help out at a community center every once in a while. They have a fundraising event coming up and they need someone to make the flyers and I remembered, hey, I know an artist. Would you be interested?” It sounds casual enough but Steve can hear the nervousness behind Sam’s voice and he grins widely. 

“I’d be happy to.”

“Great, do you want to come over on what, tomorrow afternoon? And we could go over design ideas.” 

“Tomorrow sounds great, you can text me the address.” 

They continue to chat for a few more minutes before hanging up. Steve stands there a few more minutes afterwards until he starts getting odd stares, but he can’t wipe the smile off his face all day. 

The next afternoon, Steve arrives at Sam’s apartment at the top of an old building, dripping wet from a surprise rain shower and ten minutes early. 

He doesn’t miss the way Sam’s eyes linger on the way his wet t-shirt clings to his chest, even as he wonders when he started being able to pick up on these things.

They spend all of thirty minutes going over design plans and the following several hours talking about anything and everything. The afternoon sun turns into nightfall which turns into take out Chinese while arguing over which is better, The Godfather I or The Godfather II. 

(Steve winds up staying the night and he does, indeed, wind up climbing Sam like a tree but he’s not about to tell the girls that). 

\+ 

“Hey, Sam?” Steve says, looking down at where the other man is lying sprawled across his chest. It’s ten in the morning on a Saturday and neither one of them has any intention of getting out of bed any time soon. 

“Hmm.” 

“You said they were always looking for people to help out down at the center, right?” 

“Yeah, you got an idea?” 

Steve casts his eyes back to the ceiling, looking at the cracks in the ceiling intently. This is an idea that he’s given a lot of thought over the past few weeks, an idea that’s been tugging at him that he just can’t let go. 

“I was thinking that maybe I could set up an art therapy class. You know, for veterans.” 

Sam twists and raises himself up so he’s facing Steve. It’s a habit that’s endeared him to Sam from the get-go, that he always feels the need to face people head-on when he knows they need it most. 

“Steve, that sounds like a great idea.” 

“Yeah? You think there’ll be enough interest?” 

“We’ll make it work,” Sam says, and Steve is reminded of something that his mother said to him in what feels like another life. 

“Yeah, we’ll make it work.” 

He leans up to close the gap between them, catching Sam’s lip between his teeth, and letting one of his hands wander down to the small of the other man’s back. 

“I can think of another thing we can make work,” Sam says, his voice gone slightly hoarse. 

“Yeah? That’s funny, I was just thinking the same thing.” 

\+ 

It takes a lot of last minute planning and needling, and a little bit of sending Sharon and Natasha on a stealth mission to bogart some spare art supplies from their school, but the class gets set up. 

Steve stands in the center of the room, surrounded by desks all in a circle, and hopes like hell that he knows what he’s doing. 

Most of the men and women in the room are around his age but a few are much older, the age his father would have been if he were still alive, and Steve’s heart clenches a little. 

There’s a knock at the door. “You got room for one more, Rogers?” 

Bucky is lounging against the door jamb, looking a little more worn but with a cocky grin on his face that Steve could have recognized from a mile away. 

“Bucky!” He rushes to hug the other man, feeling a profound sense of relief. There were days when he wondered if he’d ever see his friend again alive. Seeing him here, on tonight of all nights, is a weight off his back that Steve can't put into words. 

“You okay?” Steve asks in a low voice, as they pull away from their hug. 

Bucky shrugs and there’s about a dozen stories contained within it, but they’ll have to wait until after. “I’m good. You good?” 

Steve looks around the room and then back at his friend. He bumps his shoulder against Bucky’s lightly and grins. “You know, I really am.”


End file.
